Provenance in sensor data management

In today's information-driven workplaces, data is constantly being moved around and undergoing transformation. The typical business-as-usual approach is to use email attachments, shared network locations, databases, and more recently, the cloud. More often than not, there are multiple versions of the data sitting in different locations, and users of this data are confounded by the lack of metadata describing its provenance-or in other words, its lineage. The ProvDMS project at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) described in this article aims to solve this issue in the context of sensor data.